438 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : 25 cm

Charles Darwin: the man who discovered evolution? The man who killed off God? Or a flawed man of his age, part genius, part ruthless careerist who would not acknowledge his debts to other thinkers? In this bold new life - the first single volume biography in twenty-five years - A. N. Wilson, the acclaimed author of The Victorians and God's Funeral, goes in search of the celebrated but contradictory figure Charles Darwin. Darwin was described by his friend and champion, Thomas Huxley, as a 'symbol'. But what did he symbolize? In Wilson's portrait, both sympathetic and critical, Darwin was two men. On the one hand, he was a naturalist of genius, a patient and precise collector and curator who greatly expanded the possibilities of taxonomy and geology. On the other hand, Darwin, a seemingly diffident man who appeared gentle and even lazy, hid a burning ambition to be a universal genius. He longed to have a theory which explained everything. But was Darwin's 1859 master work, On the Origin of Species, really what it seemed, a work about natural history? Or was it in fact a consolation myth for the Victorian middle classes, reassuring them that the selfishness and indifference to the poor were part of nature's grand plan? Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker is a radical reappraisal of one of the great Victorians, a book which isn't afraid to challenge the Darwinian orthodoxy while bringing us closer to the man, his revolutionary idea and the wider Victorian age

Includes bibliographical references and index

A symbol -- The old hat -- What he owed to Edinburgh -- Cambridge: Charles Darwin, gent -- The voyage of the Beagle -- 'Blackbirds... gross-beaks... wren' -- The ladder by which you mounted -- Lost in the vicinity of Bloomsbury -- Half-embedded in the flesh of their wives -- An essay by Mr Wallace -- A poker and a rabbit -- Is it true? -- The Oxford debate and its aftermath -- Adios, theory -- Immense generalizations -- Evolution old and new -- Mutual aid

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